Dmitri Shostakovich was born in St. Petersburg in 1906, the son
of an engineer. He had his first piano lessons from his mother when he was nine and showed
such musical precocity that he was able at the age of thirteen to enter the Petrograd
Conservatory, where he had piano lessons from Leonid Nikolayev and studied composition
with the son-in-law of Rimsky-Korsakov, Maximilian Steinberg. He continued his studies
through the difficult years of the civil war, positively encouraged by Glazunov, the
director of the Conservatory, and helping to support his family, particularly after the
death of his father in 1922, by working as a cinema pianist, in spite of his own
indifferent health, weakened by the privations of the time. He completed his course as a
pianist in 1923 and graduated in composition in 1925. His graduation work, the First Symphony,
was performed in Leningrad in May 1926 and won considerable success, followed by
performances in the years immediately following in Berlin and in Philadelphia. As a
pianist he was proficient enough to win an honourable mention at the International Chopin
Competition in Warsaw.

Shostakovich in his early career was closely involved with the
theatre, and in particular with the Leningrad Working Youth Theatre, in musical
collaboration in Meyerhold's Moscow production of Mayakovsky's The Flea and
in film music, notably New Babylon. His opera The Nose,
based on Gogol,
was completed in 1928 and given its first concert performance in Leningrad in June 1929,
when it provoked considerable hostility from the vociferous and increasingly powerful
proponents of the cult of the Proletarian in music and the arts. The controversy aroused
was a foretaste of difficulties to come. His ballet The Golden Age was staged without
success in Leningrad in October 1930. Orchestral compositions of these years included a
second and third symphony, each a tactful answer to politically motivated criticism.

In 1934 Shostakovich won acclaim for his opera Lady Macbeth
of the Mtsensk District, based on a novella by the 19th century Russian writer Nikolay
Leskov, and performed in Leningrad and shortly afterwards, under the title Katerina
Ismailova, in Moscow. Leskov's story deals with a bourgeois crime, the murder of her
merchant husband by the heroine of the title, and the opera seemed at first thoroughly
acceptable in political as well as musical terms. Its condemnation in Pravda in January
1936, apparently at the direct instigation of Stalin, was a significant and dangerous
reverse, leading to the withdrawal from rehearsal that year of his Fourth Symphony
and the composition the following year of a Fifth Symphony, described, in terms to which
Shostakovich had no overt objection, as a Soviet artist's creative reply to justified
criticism. Performed in Leningrad in November 1937, the symphony was warmly welcomed,
allowing his reinstatement as one of the leading Russian composers of the time.

In 1941 Shostakovich received the Stalin prize for his Piano Quintet.
In the same year Russia became involved in war, with Hitler's invasion of the country and
the siege of Leningrad, commemorated by Shostakovich in his Seventh Symphony, a work he
had begun under siege conditions and completed after his evacuation to Kuibyshev.

Stricter cultural control enforced in the years following the
end of the war led, in 1948, to a further explicit attack on Shostakovich, coupled now
with Prokofiev, Miaskovsky and Khachaturian, and branded as formalists, exhibiting
anti-democratic tendencies. The official condemnation brought, of course, social and
practical difficulties. The response of Shostakovich was to hold back certain of his
compositions from public performance. His first Violin Concerto, written for David Oistrakh, was not
performed until after the death of Stalin in 1953, when he returned to the symphony with
his Tenth, which met a mixed reception when it was first performed in Leningrad in
December 1953. His next two symphonies avoided perilous excursions into liberalisation,
the first of them celebrating The Year 1905 and the fortieth anniversary of the
October Revolution of 1917 in 1957, and the second The Year 1917, completed in 1961.

In 1962 there came the first performance of the Thirteenth
Symphony, with its settings of controversial poems by Yevtushenko, and a revival of the
revised version of Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District, under the title Katerina
Ismailova. The opera now proved once more acceptable.

The last dozen years of the life of Shostakovich, during which
he suffered a continuing deterioration of health, brought intense activity as a composer,
with a remarkable series of works, many of them striving for still further simplicity and
lucidity of style. The remarkable Fourteenth Symphony of 1969, settings of poems by
Apollinaire, Lorca, Rilke and Küchelbecker, dedicated to his friend Benjamin Britten, was
followed in 1971 by the last of the fifteen symphonies, a work of some ambiguity. The last
of his fifteen string quartets was completed and performed in 1974 and his final
composition, the Viola Sonata, in July 1975. He died on 9th August.

The career of Shostakovich must be seen against the political
and cultural background of his time and country. Born in the year after Bloody Sunday,
when peaceful demonstrators in St. Petersburg had been fired on by troops, Shostakovich
had his musical education under the new Soviet regime. His own political sympathies have
been questioned and there has been controversy particularly over the publication
Testimony, The Memoirs of Dmitri Shostakovich, as related to and edited by Solomon Volkov,
once accused of fabrication in his portrayal of the composer as a covert enemy of
Bolshevism. The testimony of others and a recent scholarly survey of the life and work of
Shostakovich suggest that the general tenor of Volkov's Testimony is true enough.
Shostakovich belonged to a family of liberal tradition, whose sympathies would have lain
with the demonstrators of 1905. Under Stalinism, however, whatever initial enthusiasm he
may have felt for the new order would have evaporated with the attacks on artistic
integrity and the menacing attempts to direct all creative expression to the aims of
socialist realism. While writers and painters may express meaning more obviously,
composers have a more ambiguous art, so that the meaning of music, if it has any meaning
beyond itself, may generally be hidden. Shostakovich learned how to wear the necessary
public mask that enabled him to survive the strictures of 1936 and 1948 without real
sacrifice of artistic integrity.

The Tenth Symphony,
written in 1953, was intended as the composer's own bitter celebration of Stalin's death,
with the second movement scherzo a portrait of the defunct leader, conceived with all the
pent-up feelings of resentment held in check during years of oppression. The work had a
mixed reception. Abroad in Western Europe and in America it seemed to return Shostakovich
from a political and patriotic ghetto to the international world of the symphony, while in
Russia there were still influential musicians who found the work unrealistic and objected
to its obvious pessimism. Its eventual more general acceptance even at home effectually
widened the horizons of possible Soviet music.

The extended first movement opens with the lower strings
announcing the first thematic strand from which the rest of the movement develops, with a
further element added by the clarinet, and a third important element appearing later in
the lower register of the flute, accompanied by violins and violas. From these materials
the long opening movement grows. The scherzo is a portrait of Stalin, seen in no kindly
light and the third derives its substance from two elements, the second of which is a
musical cryptogram of the composer's name, the letters DSCH providing him, in German
letter notation, with the figure D E flat C B natural, which from now on makes its
recurrent appearance in the composer's work. The poignant conclusion of the movement is
followed by a finale that starts with all the intense feeling of Mahler. An oboe solo
follows the initial ominous music of the lower strings, offering a lament, taken up by
flute and bassoon. An Allegro lightens the mood, although tragedy, comedy and satire are
juxtaposed in what follows, the first of these strengthened by the ever-recurrent figure
that conceals the composer's name.

Czecho-Slovak Radio Symphony Orchestra (Bratislava)
The Czecho-Slovak Radio Symphony Orchestra (Bratislava), the oldest symphonic ensemble in
Slovakia, was founded in 1929. The orchestra's first conductor was Frantiek Dyk and
over the past sixty years it has worked under the direction of several prominent Czech and
Slovak conductors. The orchestra has made many recordings for the Naxos label ranging from
the ballet music of Tchaikovsky to more modern works by composers such as Copland, Britten
and Prokofiev.

Ladislav Slovak
Ladislav Slovak was born in 1919 in the Slovak capital, Bratislava, where, in spite of
straitened circumstances, he completed his earlier musical training at the City Music
School and subsequently at the Bratislava Conservatory. As a conductor he was greatly
influenced by Vaclav Talich in Bratislava and from 1954 by Yevgeni Mravinsky, to whom he
served as assistant in Leningrad. For some two years Slovak attended Mravinsky's
rehearsals with the Leningrad Philharmonic Orchestra of the symphonies of Shostakovich,
including first performances of Symphonies Nos. 11 and 12. In these rehearsals
Shostakovich was present, hearing his music in performance for the first time and rarely
interfering, except for occasional adjustments of tempi. He had great confidence in
Mravinsky, with whom there was collaboration at the profoundest musical level. Slovak was
privileged often to take part in discussions on problems of performance between Mravinsky
and Shostakovich, and also learned much from other conductors, including the second
conductor of the Leningrad Philharmonic, Kurt Sanderling. On his return to Czecho-Slovakia
Slovak was appointed Conductor-in-Chief of the Czecho-Slovak Radio Symphony Orchestra in
Bratislava, with guest engagements with the Czech Philharmonic Orchestra, which he
conducted on an extended world tour to the Far East, Australasia and Russia in 1959. In
1961 he was appointed Conductor-in-Chief of the Slovak Philharmonic Orchestra and has
continued with similar appointments as far afield as Australia and with a busy career as a
guest conductor. His early working collaboration with Mravinsky and Shostakovich has led
to performances of particular authority, in particular of the latter's fifteen symphonies.